Faire Resource Hub
Last updated September 2026
Part of our Faire Resource Hub. Start with the cornerstone guide: How to Get More Orders on Faire.
A Faire collection should do more than group similar products together. It should help a wholesale buyer quickly understand what to look at, what is relevant to their store, and where to start ordering.
After more than 15 years working in wholesale and managing brands selling on Faire, I’ve learned to think about collections from the retailer’s perspective first.
Collections are for the retailers, not for the brands. Your job is to make it easier for your buyers to shop your brand.
That principle influences everything from how we organize large catalogs to when we launch seasonal collections.
In this guide, I’ll walk through how we approach collections and merchandising in our own wholesale businesses, the mistakes I commonly see brands make, and the process we use at Faire Growth Agency to think about organizing a Faire storefront.
How Should Brands Organize Collections on Faire?
Start with what retailers are looking for, then build collections that make those products easier to discover and shop.
When I’m organizing one of our own Faire stores, I don’t start by asking how we categorize our products internally.
I start with the retailer.
- What are buyers searching for?
- What are they shopping for right now?
- What will they need three or four months from now?
- Which products would I want them to see first?
From there, we can drill down into collections based on things like:
- New products
- Seasonal demand
- Best sellers
- Product type
- Starter packs
- Retailer type
- Themes or buying occasions
The goal isn’t to create as many collections as possible. The goal is to create useful paths through your catalog.
Why Do Faire Collections Matter?
Collections help turn a catalog of individual products into a merchandiseable wholesale assortment.
Think about the experience of a retailer discovering your brand for the first time.
They’re probably not evaluating only your products. They’re looking at many brands, products, price points and assortments while deciding what deserves space in their store.
Now imagine they land on a brand with 100 products.
They can scroll through all 100. Or the brand can immediately offer them paths like:
- New Arrivals
- Best Sellers
- Spring Favorites
- Coastal Gift Shop
- Women’s Boutique
- Starter Packs
That’s a very different shopping experience.
Good merchandising reduces the amount of work you’re asking the retailer to do. And that’s especially important as your catalog grows.
Start With What Retailers Are Searching For
Our collection strategy starts with retailer demand rather than our internal product structure.
This is one of the biggest differences between simply categorizing products and actually merchandising them.
A brand might internally think about its catalog in terms of product families, manufacturing processes, collections developed by its design team, or SKU groups.
Those categories may make perfect sense inside the company. They don’t necessarily reflect how a retailer shops.
When we’re deciding what collections to create, I start with what retailers are searching and shopping for.
Then we drill down into product type, new releases, seasonality, best sellers, starter packs and different types of retailers.
That process led us to a framework we now use when thinking about Faire merchandising.
The FGA Collection Priority Framework
- Search Intent
- →
- Newness
- →
- Seasonality
- →
- Best Sellers
- →
- Buyer Type
This is not Faire’s algorithm and it is not an official Faire framework. Faire did not create or endorse it. It is a merchandising framework developed by Faire Growth Agency, based on our experience operating wholesale businesses and selling through Faire.
At Faire Growth Agency, we think about collection strategy using five priorities.
1. Search Intent
Start with the buyer. What is the retailer trying to find?
The language and themes buyers use should influence how you organize your assortment. A collection becomes much more useful when it corresponds to an actual retailer need instead of an arbitrary internal category.
2. Newness
New products deserve visibility.
When we introduce new products, they’re generally one of the first things we want existing and prospective retailers to see. A clearly merchandised New Arrivals collection gives buyers a quick way to see what’s changed since their last visit.
3. Seasonality
Wholesale happens ahead of retail.
If consumers will want something in December, retailers generally aren’t waiting until December to begin thinking about it. Collections should anticipate that buying cycle.
4. Best Sellers
Don’t make a new buyer figure out which products are working for other retailers. Show them.
A strong Best Sellers collection can give someone unfamiliar with your brand a logical starting point.
5. Buyer Type
Not every retailer shops your catalog the same way.
If you sell into multiple types of stores, consider creating curated paths that help different buyers quickly find products relevant to their businesses. That might mean a collection for a women’s boutique, coastal gift shop, resort store, spa or another retailer segment relevant to your brand.
Collections Are for Retailers, Not Brands
“Collections are for the retailers, not for the brands. Your job is to make it easier for your buyers to shop your brand.”Matt Lawenda, Founder of Faire Growth Agency
It’s easy to organize a wholesale catalog around what makes sense internally. But that’s backwards.
Your retailer shouldn’t need to understand your internal product architecture before they can place an order.
Every collection should answer some version of: why would a retailer want to shop this group of products?
- Sometimes the answer is product type.
- Sometimes it’s season.
- Sometimes it’s what’s new.
- Sometimes it’s what’s selling.
And sometimes it’s simply: “I own this type of store. Show me what’s relevant to me.”
That last one can be particularly powerful for brands with large or diverse catalogs.
Every Large Faire Catalog Should Make Best Sellers Easy to Find
If you have a substantial catalog, a Best Sellers collection gives new retailers an obvious place to begin.
I consider Best Sellers one of the most important collections a large Faire store can have.
Think about the buyer’s perspective.
- They don’t necessarily know your hero product.
- They don’t know which styles reorder.
- They don’t know what other stores gravitate toward.
- They may have never heard of your company before today.
Meanwhile, they’re shopping across many different brands.
Don’t make them solve the puzzle. Show them where to start.
A Best Sellers collection can narrow a large assortment into a more approachable group of products and help a retailer begin evaluating the brand. It doesn’t mean those are the only products they should order. It simply provides a starting point.
How Do You Organize a Large Faire Catalog?
Break a large assortment into smaller, purposeful shopping paths instead of expecting retailers to browse the entire catalog.
Collections become increasingly important as the number of products increases.
If I took over a Faire shop tomorrow with 100 products sitting in two or three generic collections, I wouldn’t start by randomly dividing those products into ten new groups.
I’d first look at what retailers are likely to start shopping for over the next several months. I’d build relevant seasonal and theme-based collections around those opportunities.
Then I’d review the individual products to make sure their titles, descriptions, categories, attributes and evergreen search terminology support discovery.
That second part matters. Collections and product optimization should work together.
A beautifully organized storefront doesn’t solve the problem if the individual products aren’t positioned clearly for the retailer. That’s why collection strategy connects directly to both Faire SEO and Faire product listing optimization in our overall approach.
Create Collections for Different Types of Retailers
When a brand sells to different types of stores, retailer-specific collections can create a shortcut through a large assortment.
This is something we use with larger catalogs.
Imagine a brand has products that could work in both women’s boutiques and coastal gift shops.
Both retailers might be good customers for the brand. But they may not be interested in exactly the same assortment.
Instead of asking each buyer to sift through the entire catalog, we can create a curated collection based on products we believe are particularly relevant to that type of retailer.
This doesn’t mean every brand needs dozens of industry-specific collections. The collection needs to serve a real purpose. But when you have enough products and serve distinct retailer segments, this can make a large catalog much easier to navigate.
With our own large catalogs, we’ve learned that choice without direction can become friction.
If a buyer feels overwhelmed, they may put off ordering. They may also find another vendor that makes the decision easier.
Our job is to remove as much unnecessary friction as possible.
How Far Ahead Should You Build Seasonal Faire Collections?
Seasonal collections should generally appear before the consumer season, because wholesale retailers buy inventory in advance.
In our businesses, we typically try to launch seasonal collections three to four months before the season itself. That’s our operating practice, not a universal Faire rule.
We also review and update our collections roughly once a month.
Why so early? Because wholesale buying happens upstream from consumer demand.
A retailer needs time to:
- Discover products
- →
- Evaluate them
- →
- Place the order
- →
- Receive inventory
- →
- Merchandise the store
- →
- Sell to consumers
If you wait until the consumer season is already underway to merchandise your wholesale storefront around it, you may be late for part of the retailer buying cycle.
This is where thinking like a wholesaler instead of only like a consumer brand becomes important. Your merchandising calendar should follow when your retailer buys, not simply when the end consumer uses the product.
Our Faire search trends for September 2026 shows how quickly seasonal search demand ramps up and falls away, which is useful when you are deciding how early to build a seasonal collection.
Use New Products to Keep the Storefront Fresh
In our stores, new products generally receive the highest merchandising priority, followed by seasonally relevant products and then established best sellers.
Our typical visibility priority is:
- New Products. New products give existing retailers something new to discover.
- Seasonal Products. Seasonal products need visibility while their buying window is relevant.
- Best Sellers. Best sellers provide an established foundation and an easy starting point for buyers who don’t know the brand.
That doesn’t mean this is the right order for every brand. But it reflects what we’re trying to accomplish.
The balance between those groups changes throughout the year. That’s another reason I don’t believe in building collections once and forgetting about them.
How Trade Shows Can Improve Faire Merchandising
Trade shows provide immediate retailer feedback that can help brands make better merchandising decisions online.
I’ve spent years working with wholesale sales representatives, showrooms, independent retailers and trade shows.
One thing physical wholesale markets give you that is incredibly valuable is instant feedback.
- You can watch buyers react to products.
- You hear the questions they ask.
- You see which styles they pick up.
- You hear what they’re shopping for.
- You discover products you expected to perform that aren’t getting attention.
And sometimes a product you weren’t emphasizing becomes the one everyone wants to talk about.
We use feedback from wholesale markets and trade shows to influence what we add to collections, what we remove, and what products deserve greater visibility.
Events such as Atlanta, Las Vegas, Surf Expo and other wholesale markets aren’t separate from our online merchandising strategy. What we learn from buyers in person can inform how we merchandise online afterward.
The important lesson isn’t that every brand needs to attend the same shows. It’s that retailer feedback should influence merchandising decisions.
Don’t ignore what your buyers are telling you.
Don’t Merchandise Faire and Then Forget About It
A Faire storefront should be tested and adjusted over time rather than treated as a finished project.
One of the most common collection problems I see isn’t complicated. Brands either don’t have useful collections, or they haven’t updated them.
A collection that made sense six months ago may no longer deserve the same prominence.
- Products change.
- Inventory changes.
- Seasons change.
- Retailer demand changes.
- New products launch.
- Your business learns.
Your merchandising should reflect that.
In our own Faire stores, we often see a bump in sales for products after placing them into new or timely collections.
That does not prove the collection alone caused the increase. Other factors may be involved.
But it’s one of the reasons we continue experimenting with how products are merchandised instead of assuming the current organization is permanently correct.
Which leads to our second framework.
The FGA Merchandising Cycle
- Test
- →
- Measure
- →
- Optimize
- →
- Repeat
This is not Faire’s algorithm and it is not an official Faire framework. Faire did not create or endorse it. It is an operating cycle developed by Faire Growth Agency, based on how we manage merchandising in our own wholesale businesses.
At Faire Growth Agency, we think about ongoing merchandising as a cycle.
Test
Try something.
- Create a new collection.
- Change the assortment.
- Feature a different group of products.
- Build a seasonal theme.
- Test a retailer-specific collection.
- Move products into a more relevant merchandising path.
Measure
Pay attention to what happens next.
Look at the performance information available to you, product activity, orders, retailer feedback and other useful signals. Don’t assume that because an idea sounded good, it worked.
Optimize
Use what you’ve learned. Keep what appears useful. Change what isn’t.
Adjust product placement, collection strategy and merchandising priorities accordingly.
Repeat
This is the part brands often miss. You’re not finished.
Retailer needs, seasons, products and assortments keep changing. So your storefront should continue changing with them.
One of the biggest merchandising mistakes a brand can make is not testing and optimizing its shop. As I often tell brands: what worked today may not work tomorrow. Always be trying new things.
If you want an outside read on what to test first, our Monthly Faire Storefront & SEO Audit is built around this cycle.
Why Beautiful Faire Stores Still Don’t Always Generate Orders
Good design helps, but retailers still need to discover the brand, understand the assortment and find products relevant to their stores.
This is something I see frequently with newer brands.
They set up a Faire account. They create a beautiful shop. And then they wait.
The assumption is that simply being on Faire will bring orders. It doesn’t always work that way.
A beautiful storefront can still struggle if the right buyers aren’t finding its products or if the assortment isn’t easy to navigate once they arrive.
We work through that whole diagnosis in our guide to why you may not be getting orders on Faire.
I think about the journey as:
- Discovery
- →
- Merchandising
- →
- Conversion
First, the retailer has to discover you. Then, your storefront has to help them shop. Finally, the products, wholesale offer and overall buying experience need to give them enough confidence to place an order.
Collections primarily live in that middle stage, but all three stages work together. This is also why our broader guide to getting more orders on Faire looks beyond any single optimization tactic.
How Collections and Faire SEO Work Together
Faire SEO helps products become relevant to retailer searches, while collections help buyers navigate and shop the assortment once they engage with the brand.
I wouldn’t treat these as separate projects.
Suppose you’re preparing for an upcoming season. You create a strong seasonal collection containing the products retailers are likely to want. That’s useful.
But you should also review those products.
- Are the titles clear?
- Are descriptions written for wholesale buyers?
- Are categories and attributes accurate?
- Does the product terminology reflect what the item actually is?
- Are relevant evergreen terms represented naturally?
That’s where Faire SEO and product listing optimization come into the picture.
The collection creates a curated shopping path. The product listing still needs to do its job. And all of that sits within the broader Faire storefront optimization strategy.
Faire Collections and Merchandising Checklist
Before considering your Faire collections finished, ask:
Retailer Intent
- Do our collections reflect how retailers actually shop?
- Are we using terminology buyers understand?
- Are there clear paths for the most important buying needs?
New Products
- Can retailers quickly find what’s new?
- Are important launches receiving enough visibility?
Best Sellers
- Is there an obvious place for a new buyer to start?
- Can retailers quickly identify established products?
Seasonal Merchandising
- Are we merchandising ahead of the consumer season?
- Are outdated seasonal collections still taking up valuable space?
Large Catalogs
- Could a new retailer reasonably navigate our assortment?
- Would retailer-specific or theme-based collections make shopping easier?
- Are we presenting enough choice without creating unnecessary friction?
Optimization
- When did we last update our collections?
- What have we tested recently?
- Are we using retailer and trade-show feedback?
- Are we measuring what happens after merchandising changes?
If several of those questions are difficult to answer, your collections probably deserve another look.
Frequently Asked Questions About Faire Collections
What collections should I create on Faire?
Start with collections that reflect genuine retailer shopping intent. Depending on your assortment, that may include New Arrivals, Best Sellers, seasonal collections, product types, starter assortments, themes and collections designed for specific retailer types.
Should every Faire store have a Best Sellers collection?
Not necessarily every store, but I strongly recommend it for brands with substantial catalogs. A Best Sellers collection gives retailers unfamiliar with your brand an obvious place to begin exploring.
How many Faire collections should I have?
There isn’t one ideal number. Create enough collections to make the catalog easier to navigate without creating so many overlapping choices that the collection structure itself becomes confusing.
How often should I update Faire collections?
There’s no universal schedule. In our businesses, we review collections approximately monthly and adjust them as products, seasons and priorities change.
When should I create seasonal collections?
Build them around the wholesale buying calendar rather than waiting for the consumer season. In our businesses, we generally aim to launch seasonal collections roughly three to four months ahead.
Should collections be organized by product type or retailer type?
Potentially both. Product-type collections can help retailers find specific merchandise, while retailer-type collections can be useful when a large assortment serves several distinct types of stores.
Can collections increase Faire sales?
Collections can improve merchandising and make a catalog easier to shop, but no collection strategy guarantees increased sales. In our own stores, we’ve observed products sometimes receive a sales bump after being placed into new or timely collections, but that does not establish that the collection alone caused the increase.
How should I organize a Faire store with 100+ products?
Start by creating purposeful shopping paths instead of forcing buyers to browse the entire assortment. Consider new arrivals, best sellers, seasonal opportunities, product types, retailer types and other themes that reflect how your buyers actually shop.
- How to Get More Orders on Faire, our cornerstone guide to the full picture.
- Faire Storefront Optimization, how the whole shop presents your brand.
- Faire SEO, how retailers find your products in the first place.
- How to Optimize Faire Product Listings, the product-level work behind every collection.
- Why Am I Not Getting Orders on Faire?, the diagnostic guide to slow Faire sales.
Want Us to Review Your Faire Merchandising?
Sometimes it’s difficult to evaluate your own storefront because you’re too familiar with your products.
The Monthly Faire Storefront & SEO Audit gives you an expert review of your storefront and product listings every month, with ready-to-use titles and descriptions and a prioritized plan for the season ahead.
Each monthly audit includes:
- A storefront and SEO report with prioritized recommendations
- A product optimization spreadsheet
- Recommended titles and descriptions written for wholesale buyers
- Seasonal buying recommendations
- Delivery within 24 to 48 hours, Monday through Friday